The Fourth K

519 Pages·1990·1.42 MB·English

by  Mario Puzo

The Fourth K
Mario Puzo
 Paperback: 512 pages
 Publisher: Pan Books; New edition (8 May 1992)
 Language English
 ISBN-10: 0330300946
 ISBN-13: 978-0330300940

 Mass Market Paperback: 496 pages
 Publisher: Ballantine Books (November 23, 2004)
 Language: English
 ISBN-10: 0345476735
 ISBN-13: 978-0345476739

The President of the US, cousin of JFK, faces the greatest crisis of his career. His only
child has been seized by terrorists making impossible demands, while at the same time,
two scientists are holding the nation to ransom with a secretly planted nuclear device.
The Fourth K
Mario Puzo

Book 1 Good Friday Easter Sunday
FOR MY CHILDREN Anthony Dorothy Eugene Virginia Joseph

Book 1 Good friday Easter sunday
Chapter 1

OLIVER OLIPHANT WAS one hundred years old and his mind was as clear as a bell.
Unfortunately for him.
It was a mind so clear, yet so subtle, that while breaking a great many moral laws, it
had washed his conscience clean. A mind so cunning that Oliver Oliphant had never fallen
into the almost inevitable traps of everyday life: he had never married, never run for
political office and never had a friend he trusted absolutely.
On a huge heavily guarded secluded estate only ten miles from the White House, Oliver
Oliphant, the richest man in America and possibly the most powerful private citizen,
awaited the arrival of his godson, the Attorney General of the United States, Christian
Klee.
Oliphant's charm equaled his brilliance; his power rested on both. Even at the advanced
age of one hundred his advice was still sought by great men who relied on his analytic
powers to such an extent that he had been nicknamed the "Oracle."
As adviser to presidents the Oracle had predicted economic crises, Wall Street crashes,
the fall of the dollar, the flight of foreign capital, the fantasies of oil prices. He had
predicted the political moves of the Soviet Union, the unexpected embraces of rivals in
the Democratic and Republican parties. But above all he had amassed ten billion dollars.
It was natural that advice from such a rich man be valued, even when wrong.
But the Oracle was nearly always right.
Now on this Good Friday, the Oracle was worried about one thing: the birthday party to
celebrate his one hundred years on this earth. A party to be held on Easter Sunday in the
Rose Garden of the White House, the host none other than the President of the United
States, Francis Xavier Kennedy.
It was a permissible vanity for the Oracle to take great pleasure in this spectacular
affair. The world would again remember him for one brief moment. It would be, he
thought sadly, his last appearance on stage.
In Rome, on Good Friday, seven terrorists made their final preparations to assassinate
the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. This band of four men and three women believed
they were liberators of mankind. They called themselves the Christs of Violence.
The leader of this particular band was an Italian youth well seasoned in the technique
of terrorism. For this particular operation he had assumed the code name Romeo; it
pleased his youthful sense of irony, and its sentimentality sweetened his intellectual love
of mankind.
On the late afternoon of Good Friday, Romeo rested in a safe house provided by the
International One Hundred.
Lying on rumpled bed sheets stained with cigarette ash and days of night sweat, he
read a paperback edition of The Brothers Karamazov. His leg muscles cramped with
tension, perhaps fear, it didn't matter. It would pass as it always did. But this mission was
so different, so complex, involved so much danger to the body and the spirit. On this
mission he would be truly a Christ of Violence, that name so Jesuitical it always moved
him to laughter.
Romeo had been born Armando Giangi, to rich high society parents, who subjected him
to a languid, luxurious, religious upbringing, a combination that so offended his ascetic
nature that at the age of sixteen he renounced worldly goods and the Catholic Church. So
now, at twenty-three, what greater rebellion could there be for him than the killing of the
Pope? And yet there was still, for Romeo, a superstitious dread. As a child he had
received holy confirmation from a red-hatted cardinal. Romeo remembered always that
ominous red hat painted in the very color of the fires of hell.
So confirmed by God in every ritual, Romeo prepared himself to commit a crime so
terrible that hundreds of millions would curse his name, for his true name would become
known. He would be captured. That was part of the plan. But in time he, Romeo, would
be acclaimed as a hero who helped change the existing cruel social order. What was
infamous in one century would be seen as saintly in the next. And vice versa, he thought
with a smile. The very first Pope to take the name of Innocent, centuries ago, had issued
a papal bull authorizing torture, and had been hailed for propagating the true faith and
rescuing heretic souls.
It also appealed to Romeo's youthful sense of irony that the Church would canonize the
Pope he was planning to kill. He would create a new saint. And how he hated them, all
these popes. This Pope Innocent IV, Pope Pius, Pop edict, oh they sanctified too much,
these amassers of wealth, these suppressors of the true faith of human freedom, these
pompous wizards who smothered the wretched of the earth with their magic of
ignorance, their hot insults to credulity.
He, Romeo, one of the First Hundred of the Christs, of Violence, would help erase that
crude magic. Vulgarly called terrorists, the First Hundred were spread over Japan,
Germany, Italy, Spain and even the tulipy Dutch. It was worth noting that there were
none of the First Hundred in
America. That democracy, that birthplace of freedom, had only intellectual
revolutionaries who fainted at the sight of blood. Who exploded their bombs in empty
buildings after warning people to leave; who thought public fornication on the steps of
houses of state an act of idealistic rebellion. How contemptible they were. It was not
surprising that America had never given one man to the Revolutionary Hundred.
Romeo put a halt to his daydreaming. What the hell, he didn't know if there were a
hundred. There might be fifty or sixty, it was just a symbolic number. But such symbols
rallied the masses and seduced the media. The only fact he really knew was that he,
Romeo, was one of the
First Hundred, and so was his friend and fellow conspirator Yabril.
One of the many churches of Rome chimed its bells. It was nearly six in the evening of
this Good Friday. In another hour Yabril would arrive to review all the mechanics of the
complicated operation. The killing of the Pope would be the opening move of a brilliantly
conceived chess game, a series of daring acts that delighted Romeo's romantic soul.
Yabril was the only man who had ever awed Romeo, physically and mentally.